Plickers: One Device Formative Assessment

I am a fan of formative assessment, but it is usually difficult to grade the assessment quickly enough to give the student timely feedback.  With Plickers, grading simple formative questions is as easy as grabbing your smartphone and launching an app.

What Is It?

Plickers is an app for Android and iOS that lets a user activate the camera on her device and gather results from a question.  Students in the class hold up a card with a visual code (similar to a QR) in one of 4 orientations.  Then, the teacher scans the room using the Plickers app, and it gathers the answers and grades them.

Plickers "Card"

How To Use It

1.  Go to www.plickers.com and sign up for a teacher account

2.  Go to the "Cards" tab and choose the size card that you would like and print them.  I suggest printing and laminating the cards.

3.  From the "Classes" tab, add a class.  You may have up to 65 students in one class

4.  Enter student names and Plickers will automatically assign a "card" to the student

5.  Go to the "Library" tab and enter questions that you wish to ask the class

6.  Assign the questions to a class

7.  Install the Plickers app on your phone/tablet

8.  Choose your class in the app after you have signed in

9.  Choose the question that you are asking

10.  Have students hold up the cards with the answer choice they select oriented to the top

11.  Press the camera button inside the question

12.  Scan the students' answers

13.  Press the check mark when you are finished to commit the data and examine the results.  Alternately, click the graph button to clear the results.

Notes

The app will hover the student's name over her card and will list all students in the class at the top of the screen along with color coding the incorrect and correct answers and totaling them.  Once the results are scanned and committed, the Plickers web platform will save them under the "Reports" tab.  

The cards can be used for multiple classes since you assign the card to a specific student in a specific class and then choose the class from the app.  It is best to print the student's name in each class on the card before laminating them.  Then, you can attach the cards to the bottom of the students' desks using Velcro.